Harold Fisch Quotes
Just as one wife does not have two husbands so one land does not have two sovereign nations in possession of it.
Harold Fisch, *, Rector, Bar-Ilon University, Israel, Quoted in Clement Leslie, The Rift in Israel: Religious Authority and Secular Democracy, 1971
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Arguing that the Arabs will never agree willingly to a Jewish state:
A minority of Jewish Israelis do not recognize the United Nations 1949 partition boundaries of the land creating modern Israel. They believe that God gave all the land to the Jewish people—as described in the Bible. Therefore, to them, the West Bank is a part of Israel. No Israeli government has ever maintained that position. However some governments which depend on settler and ultra-Orthodox support do not publicly disavow the position. Palestinians, look with alarm, on this view and the constant attempts at encroachment on West Bank land that the settlers attempt. Like the extremist Palestinians who want to sabotage any two-state solution, there is a minority of Israelis who do the same. These two groups made the peace process very difficult as their adherents are not only very passionate about their views, but have political influence out of proportion to their relatively small number of voters.
His is one extremist view of Jerusalem. Most historians agree that both Jews and Arabs have lived in Jerusalem since recorded history. Extremists on both sides of the Arab Israeli debate have constructs which deny the existence of the other group. Sisalem is one. Both the Palestinians and Jews claim Jerusalem as their capital and both have reasonable historical claims, and both have shared the city for thousands of years.
The recommendation for partition was the basis of the decision of the United Nations in 1949 to partition Palestine.
The mandatory power was Great Britain which had been “mandated” to maintain order in Palestine. The British were leaving Palestine and under the Balfour Declaration—See {594001} –they were to provide a homeland for the Jewish people. The General Assembly then voted overwhelmingly by this declaration that Palestine should be partitioned into an Arab State and a Jewish State--Israel. When the British left, however, some of the Palestinian Arabs together with the combined armies of the neighboring Arab states attacked the fledgling Jewish state, and to their surprise were beaten by the Israelis. This was the first of the Arab-Israeli wars as some Arabs have never accepted this UN Resolution and have continued to destroy the state of Israel.
He uses the term Palestine to mean the entire area including Israel.
Commenting on Israel's right to exist:
Harold Fisch, also known as Aharon Harel-Fisch (Hebrew: אַהֲרֹן הַרְאֵל-פִישׁ), was a British-Israeli author, literary critic, translator, and diplomat. He was a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Bar-Ilan University, of which he served as Rector from 1968 to 1971. He was awarded the Israel Prize for Literature in 2000.
